Final impressions of China

For starters: China is a huge, beautiful country with lots of diversity in landscapes, people, food etc. We could easily have travelled for another month and not get bored:

But: the Chinese are very loud and since there are many, many Chinese you can imagine that a quiet place is a rare thing;

Tourism in China focusses mainly on Chinese tourists, hardly on foreign tourists. Both in and outside the big cities (and even at airports), there are very few people who can communicate with you;

The communication “challenge” has an upside: sometimes you eat things and it is for the better that nobody can tell you what it is;

In general China is much more expensive then we expected. On average tea and coffee in restaurants costed more than 5 euro. The advantage of tea however is that you can keep refilling your glass because the tea still tastes good after adding hot water at least three times;

Many shops translate the name of the shop in English (probably using Google), without knowing if the translation is right. This often leads to crazy, funny translations as you might have seen in some pictures on our blog (see also Foto album of Songpan);

Traffic is crazy (at best), you often wonder how anybody can survive;

In general Chinese people (especially those “on duty”) are not very social, polite or respectful to others. Oh, and in case you didn't know .... they can be very loud;

But of course we also met some very kind Chinese people (like the guy in Lijiang - without his help we would have been sleeping in the street ...);

They try to keep the surroundings, especially in nature parks, clean, and the touristy parts in most parts of the big cities are also quite clean;

Hot water is very important to the Chinese, either for their tea, that they carry with them in a bottle using every chance to refill it, or to make instant noodle soup;

The beds are made of concrete;

The Chinese people love to be in a picture with Western people, they consider us to be beautiful..... Yes, we know: crazy!;

Travelling often means waiting, add to that all the delays (50% of our domestic flights): more than enough time to write all the stories on our blog (for those of you that have been wondering......);